Archive for September, 2017

I was joking when, a few posts back, I said I had thought we were done with demo. Why did I tempt fate? Look what we found on the sheathing in the newer section of the house. That fuzzy gray stuff ain’t lint, folks. Mold. Speckled across every single sheet of plywood. No black mold, thank […]

I didn’t get any new hardwood flooring laid today, but I did finish the subfloor in the new TV room. Before: After replacing a bunch of the old joists and patching up the old subfloor, it looked even more scabrous. I could have just laid down felt paper and then hardwoods on top of it, […]

You can’t put felt paper and shingles down on wet plywood, because since they are waterproof they will prevent the water from getting back out and you’ll get mold and other nasty stuff. So I had to wait until it’d dried out. But check it out: Done! (It still looks too large to me, but it’ll look a […]

Check out the water damage on these floors. These floors were adjacent to the worst of the termite damage, and it shows. They are in really, truly sad shape. Then at some point, someone came in and did these crude repairs. See how they cut into the adjacent boards with their circular saw? There were […]

Got all the carpentry done! Took me a couple days, which is disheartening for such a tiny little structure. And I seem to have – somehow – made it about twice as big as it was in my mockups. …Oops. The better to keep the rain off, my dear. (That is what I get for […]

I got up bright and early today. I really did! And I had planned to go ahead and start work. But then … well, Sofía volunteered to make breakfast, and I had a really good book, and Josh made me some very lovely tea, and… I did finally get out the door but not until nearly […]

One tiny project that I can do while I wait is make an awning for the basement door. See how flat the face is? There’s no access from the inside of the house, so the basement door is kept locked. Which means that every time it rains and you want to access the basement, you’re […]

So I mentioned that I’d come up with some new ideas? Well, when I was trying to fix some of the framing on the half-finished back porch, my carpenter asked why I didn’t put the second bath back there instead of in the house. I’d had that thought before, but somehow it slipped through the […]

Did I mention that my carpenter is great? Everyone in rehab seems to complain about the difficulty of finding good contractors. They don’t show up, they don’t finish jobs, or they don’t do the work right… I’ve been very lucky. I found my guy pretty soon into the project. He works weekends and shows up when he says […]

Oh, boo. Of course it couldn’t have gone perfectly. That looks like a hammer “oops” to me… but the guys swear they had just unwrapped it and it was like that. HM. And of course there’s no warranty or anything on glass breakage… so I have my first repair. Blah. In the scheme of things […]